Assessing School Readiness in Cyprus

School readiness is a concept used to describe a set of necessary prerequisites for a child’s satisfactory transition to the schooling experience. It undoubtedly involves the complex, interdisciplinary and inter-depending relations between the child, school and family and leads to a dynamic perspective of this system, whose parts are inter-subsidized with the final aim to achieve the integration of the child into the Primary school system. This multidimensional view of school readiness sets the context for this paper, which reports on a study with an aim to establish a reliable diagnostic test for school readiness for Cypriot kindergarten children entering the primary school. We start with an overview of how school readiness has been measured internationally so far, and a review of the main findings in regards to such measures, like the association with children’s background characteristics and their future performance. We then present our instrument and report on the results of our pilot investigations with a sample of 128 children aged 5.5 to 6.5 years old. Our methods and analysis include both the use of the Rasch model for the validation of our constructed school readiness measures, as well as further statistical models for the for the comparison of children of various backgrounds on these measures. We conclude with a discussion of our main findings and the implications from the use of the constructed measures for potential language disorders, and identification of possible weaknesses at the four measurable aspects of school readiness (cognitive, language, motor and emotional).